


A Random Selection of Bad Habits

by elrhiarhodan



Series: Elrhiarhodan's 2019 Personal Writing Challenge [1]
Category: Kingsman (Movies)
Genre: 5+1 Things, Angst, Family, Fix-It, Grief, Introvert, M/M, Major Character Death - Canon, Or Is It?, Percilot - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-25
Updated: 2019-02-25
Packaged: 2019-11-05 16:33:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,274
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17922389
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elrhiarhodan/pseuds/elrhiarhodan
Summary: Alastair Morton, Percival to all but his family, is a quiet fellow.  Some people would say he's shy, but he's not - he's introvert and finds large groups of people exhausting.  He's also a bit sly and is not squeamish about manipulating people.  He also loves deeply and profoundly.A five-plus-one exploration into the psyche of the quiet man known as Agent Percival.





	A Random Selection of Bad Habits

**1 - Trolls**

Roxy, as always, is hanging back. It's not shyness or diffidence; his niece is watching, observing, waiting for just the right moment to catch his attention among the crowd of noisy adults and noisier children. The Mortons are a big family, boisterous and kind of baffling if you're an introvert who needs peace and solitude to recharge. But Roxy's not the introvert that he is; she doesn't get wound up and long for escape like he had at her age. She enjoys people, even if she isn't the loud and boisterous type.

Percival respects that, and in a way, envies her ability to be part of the family in a way they understand. She's smart too, and even though she's only twelve, Percival knows that when the time comes, he's going to make Chester's head explode and propose her as a candidate. She'll sweep the table, that's for certain.

He catches her eye and subtly tilts his head towards the door. She leaves the room and a few minutes later, Percival excuses himself and heads out the same way. There's a knife blade of light coming from the library and Percival finds his niece there, she's sitting in one of the enormous wing chairs that flank the unlit fireplace, swinging her feet back and forth.

"Welcome home, Uncle Alastair."

"Thank you, sweetheart. You've been keeping everyone on their toes?"

Roxy grins, "Just like you told me to." 

"So I guess you want this." Percival takes a small bag from his pocket and tosses it to Roxy. "From America."

Roxy pulls out a tiny Troll doll of surpassing ugliness. It has red, white, and blue hair and wearing American flag overalls. She hops down and runs over to give him a hug. "Thank you, thank you, thank you."

"How many does this make?"

"Twelve, I think. No – thirteen." Roxy rattles off the list of "national" troll dolls he's found for her. Percival doesn't know why Roxy wants these horrible, nightmarish things, but she does and he's willing to indulge her.

"How did you like America?"

"It's big."

"No shit, Sherlock." He gives her a stern look and Roxy giggles. "I know, _language_. I'm supposed to be a lady."

"Yes, my dear. You are."

"So, can you tell me about America? Where did you go?"

Percival gestures to the chairs and waits for his niece to take a seat before sitting down himself. "I had to go to Iowa – which is in the middle of that country and flat as Champagne that had been poured six hours ago." He fills in some details – corn and cows and long, straight roads – information he'd gotten from a tourist website he'd found on his flight home from Brazil.

Someday, if Roxy does make it to Kingsman as a knight, he'll tell her that he'd purchased all of those ugly little dolls off of the Internet and made up the travel stories. It's not that he doesn't trust Roxy. It's that he trusts no one.

:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

**2 - The Table**

"I wish you wouldn't do that." James leans against the door jam, looking like sin – rather ridiculous sin in a windowpane checked suit and a striped Kingsman tie. But still sinfully handsome.

Percival sighs. "If we had a bigger place, maybe with a basement, where I could have a proper workbench, I wouldn't need to use your grandmother's Sheridan dining table to clean my rifle."

James makes that face, the one that drives Percival to a bit of madness. Makes him want to sweep his precious rifle to the floor and dump his husband-to-be on the table and tear off his clothes. But he doesn't. He just straightens out the edge of the padded mat that protects the precious wood, and starts disassembling the weapon.

James stands behind him, so close that Percival can smell his cologne. "I love watching you work."

Percival looks up and says in a tone that is bound to rile his partner up, "Because you don't know how to do it yourself."

James doesn't fall for the bait, he just brushes his nails against his lapel, looks at them and very casually says, "I am like the lily in the field, I neither toil or spin. And yet, oddly enough, I do care about my clothes."

"You are quoting Matthew to me?" Percival chuckles. "Be careful, dear heart, God might hear you and strike you down for such blasphemy."

James, completely disregarding the delicate state of the disassembled rifle, wraps his arms around Percival and kisses him under his ear. "When did you start believing in an almighty?"

"All right, let me rephrase, 'if God exists - and I don't believe it does - it might strike you down, blah, blah, blah.' Does that satisfy your need for precision?"

James kisses him again and Percival shivers. "Only you can satisfy any of my needs."

Percival ducks his head and smiles. James lets him finish working on his rifle, cleaning it, making minute adjustments to the fittings, and reassembling it. Tomorrow, he'll take it to the range and do several test fires with a spotter, before packing it up. The day after that he leaves for Macao and an assignment involving a cartel of human traffickers. James is heading out tomorrow, to Argentina, but he's being atypically closed-mouthed about the assignment. This will be their last assignments before their wedding.

After he packs away the rifle, he grabs James and bends him over the dining table. When James complains about the angle, Percival picks him up and nearly throws his back out, carrying him into their bedroom. It's the last time they make love.

Still in Macao on assignment, Percival holds it together – for _James_. He puts on his glasses, drinks the toast to the fallen Lancelot, and proposes his niece, Roxanne, as James' replacement.

When he gets home, he takes an axe to the dining table and replaces it with a pine monstrosity from Ikea.

:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

**3 – Bad Smells**

To say the he hates Chester King is something of an understatement. No, Percival actively despises the man who sits in Arthur's seat. 

It hadn't started out that way. He'd been an agent for only a year before Chester had been elected, and he'd even voted for the former Agent Bors. On paper, King had seemed an excellent fit, he'd had all the right connections, had a charming – almost affable – manner, and if not a leader who could inspire, he had the administrative skills that Kingsman needed.

For the first few years, Percival had minimal issues with this Arthur. He'd disliked the man's increasingly classist and racist attitudes, but that hadn't affected how he worked in the field. Percival had been relieved to find that several of the more senior agents – Galahad, Lancelot, Bedivere – didn't share in King's disdain for the masses. It had helped that the Kingsman Quartermaster actively worked to mitigate King's more deleterious effects on the organization. 

The dislike boils over into active disdain when Percival meets the young man who had stepped into the retired Lancelot's shoes. James Spencer is everything that Alastair Morton is not – outgoing, confident, able to make conversation with people he doesn't know, comfortable in social situations. In other words, an extrovert. And Percival falls in love, hard and fast and forever. To his everlasting delight, James returns those feelings, and within a few weeks, Alastair gives up his Kingsman provided apartment 

Arthur, though, is furious. Situational homosexuality is more than acceptable; it's part of the job. But actually loving another man is beyond the pale. Arthur had tried to convince the other members of the Table that Alastair and James were unfit to be Kingsman, but Kingsman's by-laws are quite clear, an agent can only be terminated by a formal and unanimous vote. Chester had only been able to muster support from two other knights, and then both of those gentlemen had changed their minds when Galahad, Bedivere and Merlin threatened to quit. The agency could – barely – survive the loss of Galahad and Bedivere, but everyone knows that Merlin is the one who actually makes things work and keeps everyone safe.

Since then, Arthur is barely civil to Percival and avoids contact with him whenever possible. Perhaps because he blames Percival for Lancelot's "defection", Arthur doesn't have a similar problem with the other agent. On the rare occasions that Percival needs to meet with have Arthur, he gets a little of his own brand of vengeance.

He finds the most vile-smelling men's colognes and douses himself it in before he goes into a meeting with Arthur. And Arthur, despite his racism, his homophobia, his classism, still prides himself on his gentlemanly manners and doesn't comment. Percival takes great joy in seeing the old bastard's eyes water and will make it a point to sit as close to him as possible.

This doesn't endear himself to his colleagues, and Merlin has cursed him out in several Gaelic languages for the cost of upgraded air filters. He's also had to sacrifice a suit (although not one of the Kingsman bullet-proof ones), but that pays off over time; the accretion of foul cologne in the wool just makes things worse. James makes him store the suit in an air-tight bag in his office at HQ just so the smell doesn't permeate their small flat in the Regent's Park Crescent.

He wears it for the memorial service that Kingsman holds for James and everyone gives him a wide berth, although Galahad approaches afterwards and gives him a tight hug, his need to comfort overcoming his aversion to the foul aroma clinging to the wool suiting. 

After Eggsy Unwin ends Chester King's reign as Arthur (and his life), after the world starts to make sense again, Percival takes the suit out, cuts a small swatch of fabric and burns the rest. As he watches the flames consume the wool, he wishes that James could be here to enjoy the moment with him.

:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

**4 – Flowers**

Kingsman doesn't retrieve its fallen agents. They are dead and there's nothing that can be done about that, and putting other agents in harm's way to get a dead body back is bad for business. It's a rather cold and comfortless policy, but it makes sense.

That doesn't mean that Kingsman does not honor their dead. There's the Toast to the Fallen that Arthur leads as soon as a death is confirmed, and a larger and more inclusive service when the agent's memorial portrait is ready for unveiling. There's even a long gallery in the mansion just for these paintings – the Memorial Hall. It's a way to give closure to the few who might still be grieving and provide object lessons for the recruits who are in competition to replace the dead.

Percival finds little solace in the portrait of James Neville Ryan Spenser, Lancelot VI. To his eye, it's badly done and looks as much like his beloved as a pug looks like a bulldog. Portrait-James isn't smiling, whereas real-James always smiled. Portrait-James is in a dark navy suit while real-James hated such somber colors. The eyes are flat, the hands are pudgy, the chin weak. It's a sloppy piece of work and when he first sees it, Percival wants to take it down and burn it. After the memorial service, he stands there and stares at the painting and realizes that maybe it's not that bad.

Galahad blames Arthur for this monstrosity and offers to have the painting redone, at his own expense. Percival thanks his comrade but declines, telling Galahad that James would find this abomination amusing.

In truth, Percival is glad that this portrait looks nothing like the man he loves so much. For all of his life, Percival had prided himself on his ability to face the most unpleasant of truths, to be coolly rational when confronted with the worst that humanity has to offer. But when it comes to James, Percival can only cope by pretending that his beloved is just away on a long mission, under deep cover and unable to contact anyone. 

But in order to maintain that level of self-delusion, he finds he has to deny the portrait's existence. That's impossible when he passes it every day he's at HQ – the Memorial Gallery is the central passage between the old building with the agents' offices and the rest of the Kingsman organization. He can't take it down and he can't drape a cloth over it, but he can hide it.

He finds an antique Chinese palace urn, nearly a meter and a half tall and puts it on marble pedestal. Every week he has it filled with the most extravagant flowers, sprays of roses and lilies and branches of glossy green leaves. The vase is placed right in front of the portrait, effectively hiding it from everyone.

Percival takes comfort in the belief that James would love the over-the-top display of grief and devotion and would laugh his ass off knowing just how much it pisses off Arthur, who can't do a damn thing about it.

:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

**5 – The Ring**

James drops the morning edition of the London Times next to Percival's coffee cup, but he doesn't pick it up. He reads his news on his tablet, and the thing is, James knows that since they've more than occasionally argued about cancelling the delivery. But James seems to like the staidness of newsprint and Percival does have to admit that the old newspapers are useful for spreading out on the table when he's cleaning a weapon or polishing his shoes.

"Well?"

"Well, what?" Percival sighs and looks up at James. "It'll be easier if you just tell me what has happened in the world, rather than have me figure it out."

James laughs (and that's a sound Percival will never tire of hearing). "Of course, darling. The law has passed both Houses and Her Majesty has granted Royal Assent." James just stands there, waiting, glowing with delight.

Percival takes his time, finishes his coffee and wipes his lips. He goes down on one knee and takes James' hand. "Will you consent to marry me, darling?" He knows the words are old-fashioned in the extreme.

James pulls him up, into his arms and kisses him, softly, sweetly. "You fucking bet I do."

"Good, because I've already bought us rings." Percival takes a small velvet bag out of his breast pocket, opens it and two gold bands drop into his palm. "I've even had them engraved."

"You – you!" 

To Percival's delight, James is at a loss for words. "I saw the news late last night and figured you'd want to be the one to point it out to me."

James looks at the inscription on the inside of the band, "December 18, 1997 – the day we met."

Percival nods, "You'd just come back from Iraq and needed to be fitted for your first suit."

"And I accidentally walked into Fitting Room One just as you were getting dressed. You had the finest ass I'd ever seen."

Percival adds, not unkindly because it's the truth, "And you'd seen plenty."

"My fair share. Why Chester thinks that I'd been straight before you 'converted' me, I have no clue."

"Let's not talk about that cunt." Percival takes one of the rings and slips it onto James' finger, then James does the same for him. It's taken them almost seventeen years to get here; they really should savor the moment. 

They really should.

"I know that look."

Percival can't quite control the smirk. "And?"

"Race you back to the bedroom." James is off and running before he finishes the sentence, and Percival's just one step behind. There really are no losers in a contest like this.

A soundly fucked and very sweaty James curls into the shelter of Percival's arms and asks, "So, when do we want to make this official?"

"Hmm, the Act goes into effect on March 13th of next year and there's a sixteen day waiting period, so how about March 29th?"

James lifts himself up on one elbow and looks at Percival like he's slightly nuts. "That is not nearly enough time – with my family, it'll have to be January next year at the earliest. Besides, I've always dreamed of being a winter bride. "

Percival blinks. "Bride? You want a wedding dress?"

"Is that a problem?"

Percival takes a deep breath and reorders his thoughts, trying to imagine James in a version of Kate Middleton's dress. "It's just not something I'd expected that you'd want – but if it'll make you happy, then it'll make me happy."

James drops a fond kiss on his nose. "No, I don't want a wedding dress, _per se_ , but I was thinking of something a little more sartorially exotic, a _nawabi_ or a _sherwanis_."

"Indian dress?" 

"Just for myself; you will be gorgeous in your Kingsman suit."

Percival finds that he isn't at all opposed to the idea. "And I am guessing you already have a tailor in mind."

"Naturally." James settles down next to him. "I guess you're going to want to move into a bigger place."

"No, this is fine. Just enough room for the two of us." Percival is startled by a stray and uncomfortable thought. "Unless you want children?" He holds his breath waiting for James' answer.

"Are you serious? We're spies; we are absolutely unsuited for raising children."

Percival relaxes. "Just wanted to know. If you did – well, we'd have to make some adjustments."

"Don't worry. I'm enough of a child for both of us." James lifts up his hand to admire the ring. "We can't wear these on mission. Would be weird with the signet rings. And even though you don't want to talk about it, Chester will pitch a fit to end all fits when he finds out."

"I've already thought about what to do when we're away. I've gotten chains for us – we'll keep the rings on them when we are at HQ, and when you're on mission, I'll wear yours."

"And vice-versa, when you're out of town."

Percival nods. "And if we're both away, we'll leave them home."

"Do you have any idea how much I love you?" James kisses him on his bicep.

"About as much as I love you."

They set a wedding date for mid-January, 2015, and plan to honeymoon in the Maldives. James is pronounced dead and Arthur gives the Toast to the Fallen a week before they are supposed to be married.

Percival wears James' ring and his own on a single chain that he never takes off, even when he's on mission. He doesn't care if he's killed and someone finds it. After all, it's far less identifying than any of the Kingsman gear that he carries.

:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

**+1 – Goodnight**

Every night, without fail, Percival whispers "Good night, James, come home soon." He takes their rings and holds them between his lips so he can fall asleep.

Three years and some months after James' portrait had been hung in the Memorial Hall, Percival is in the bed he'd once shared with James, trying to fall asleep. The older he gets, the harder it becomes.

A noise from the living room disturbs his peace – it sounds like a door opening. Percival reaches for the gun he keeps holstered against the mattress and thumbs off the safety. He doesn't wait for danger to come to him even though he's naked, and goes to confront whoever is in his living room.

James looks up from the pile of mail Percival had deposited on the sideboard and says, "That's definitely a gun, but are you happy to see me?"

__

FIN

**Author's Note:**

> James alive! After so many years? And we saw him cut in half, so how is this possible? I have my headcanon, not quite ready to share it just yet, so take it on faith that it does make sense.


End file.
